Success Story

With all the grace of a scorned lover, the Dallas Morning News faced up to the fact that Republican Richard M. Nixon was not the new President of the U.S. "Let's give him a chance," editorialized the News on the morning of John F. Kennedy's inauguration. Then it went on, "Kennedy made 220 promises. The News neither hopes nor expects that the new President will be able to make good." Since then, President Kennedy has bathed in the warm approval of most of the U.S. press--but in the eyes of the News he has done almost nothing right.

The News decried Kennedy's report to Congress on the nation's economy: "Put together by old-style economists and giveaway gimmecrats." It derided his first efforts to solve the farm problem: "What the President is really saying is that he himself has no program for taking care of the farmer, that the Secretary of Agriculture has no plan." It deflated the Peace Corps: "A warmed-over version of the late President Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps." It deplored Kennedy's proposal to expand aid to education: "Do you want the control of your children's future in the hands of federal bureaus, many of them staffed with pro-Communist employees?"

For Republicans. In circulation, the News is Texas' biggest newspaper (217,037, against the Houston Post's 216,538). But by many accepted standards, the News is not up to snuff: it stints on international and national news, prefers to adorn its pages with local and syndicated columnists. The heart of the News is its editorial page, and it is generally agreed that in its local editorial influence the News ranks second to no paper anywhere. Conservative Dallas is the political reflection of the conservative News. In politics, this means that Dallas and the News prefer Republicans to Democrats, given half a chance. In Bruce Alger, strongly supported by the News, Dallas has a four-term Republican Congressman--the only member of his party in the Texas delegation to Washington. In 1952 and 1956, Republican Dwight Eisenhower, backed by the News, carried Democratic Texas by margins slighter than his Dallas pluralities. In 1960, Republican Nixon lost Texas--but still took the Dallas area by nearly 2 to 1.

Against Intellectuals. The News was so hard on Harry Truman that he once complained that "it has treated me like a pickpocket." It has called Washington the Negro capital of the U.S. It is merciless toward the Supreme Court: "Court-nik," editorialized the News, has "surrendered to subversion." Chief Justice Earl Warren is a particular bete noire of News Editorial Columnist Lynn Landrum: "Earl Warren would not make a good, reliable justice of the peace." The News stands against intellectuals ("during the last 20 years they have been wrong by a wider margin than any other group that has ever attempted to influence American life"), the Bill of Rights ("used to create a big bill of wrongs"), Dallas' own Southern Methodist University ("periodically host to pinkos"), and two noted native sons: House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

Such editorial views are the personal views of the News's longtime publisher, Edward Musgrove ("Ted") Dealey, 68 (now chairman of the board, with his son, Joseph Dealey, having taken over as president), who came to control in 1940. Until then, the News, established in 1885, had drifted along with the prairie wind, going nowhere in particular. But Ted Dealey, a man addicted to grey suits and black-and-white convictions, swung the paper onto his own course.

Klan to Cattle Dips. That course has had its pitfalls. In its preoccupation with political judgments, the News stands in some danger of being a newspaper whose strength lies mostly in its shout. Its last major crusade came in 1924, when it helped chase the Ku Klux Klan out of Texas, although Dealey is still fond of pointing out that the News was the first Southern newspaper to call venereal diseases by their right names and the first paper in Texas to crusade for arsenical cattle dips. The News has only two staffers outside of Texas: Washington Correspondents Robert E. Baskin and John Mashek. Aware of its news deficiencies, the News ordered a reduction in the use of syndicated material from 50% of available news space to 25%. Said Managing Editor Jack Krueger, who engineered the reduction: "We've cleaned out the paper for news."

None of these things bothers Ted Dealey, who thinks of the News as a pulpit and of its readers as a congregation: "We feel a duty along the lines of leading them in thought along the proper channels. We are just the same as we always were. I'd say the left has just moved farther left. The leftist influence has gotten so much stronger that we have got to holler louder to make ourselves heard." On those terms, the News is a hollering success.

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